Home » Apex The Secret Race Across America – A documentary that will shed light on the real coast-to-coast Cannonball Run


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The first film was about Apex automakers like Porsche and Koenigsegg trying to build the fastest cars on earth with the best technology of our time. It is even legitimate, socially acceptable, unless you hate supercars. If this is a story about what happens in daylight, the latest film in the series, Apex: The Secret Race across America is what happens in the shadows.

With interviews taken over several decades, the film covers two important stories of what is known colloquially Cannonball Run: an attempt to drive coast to coast, from New York to Los Angeles, faster than anyone ever has done anything.


The first story is the final race of 1983 American Express, the successor of the original Cannonball which resulted in a record 32 hours, the time of 7 minutes that for decades. The second is on the drivers Alex Roy and Dave Maher, and how they finally broke that record in 2007.

This is not a tour quietly. It involves a lot of radar detectors, police scanners, highway speed three figures, a plane that monitors air and many close calls along the way.
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtcJVCXT8P0[/embedyt]
Needless to say, none of this is part of an officially sanctioned race event. It is illegal. That’s the whole point. He has always been.

The film is a kind of re-expanded cut the film 32 hours 7 minutes, the original documentary film drawn Cory Welles rear seat intercepted by Roy. This film has been linked in legal hell for years, but this new version is hailed as definitive at least some of its principles. Furthermore, Ice-T is now here to provide the narration.

The parachutes in action movie opening with Roy blasting through Oklahoma in his blue BMW M5. He tried cross country register, not a spur of the moment drive, but something well coordinated until spotter plane. It is on the radio with his driver head as they keep an eye on the ground. But the hard drive marshes as they come out of a toll booth. Roy pulls on and off the motor.

“For every minute they are stationary, they have to go 180 miles an hour to match 90, which is obviously not going to happen,” said the driver. Roy forlornly closes the cover, surrounded by a band of radar equipment and radio is now essentially useless.

That was in April 2006. The rest of the film is about what happened next, and what preceded. It covers the culture, if you want to call it, another word could be stress-people whose goal is to drive as fast as possible from one end of the country to another.
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These attempts are almost as old as the automobile itself. The Cannonball Run is named after Erwin “Cannon Ball” Baker, a racing driver, daredevil and vaudeville artist who led New York to Los Angeles in about 54 hours by 1933. (In Graham-Paige, as We did it.)

His record was until 1971 when the legendary car and scribe of Brock Yates driver and his friends showed up, ostensibly to make a political point. The film tells the objective Yates was to show that America’s roads could, indeed, be used to the same extreme speeds you see on Autobahn in Germany. He was also said to be a protest against the unpopular national speed limit of 55 mph time.
Illustration iApex article entitled: The secret Race Across America / i takes you Inside The Darker Side Of Speed

After years of additional courses, awareness, magazine articles and a Burt Reynolds movie very popular, Cannonball Run had become a “circus,” an event with “the wrong kind of attention,” as one veteran put .

In the early 1980s, the US had turned into an express invitation only event run by deeply frenzied competition that improved their fuel cells and packed with the best technology they could buy or build in their Porsches and Ferraris and Pantera. It ended in 1983 with a 32 hour record 7 minutes that Roy and Maher until it removed the board.
The Cannonball Run is fun, but not as legendary as the actual race


We must pause a little to consider such a record. Drivers were on average 89 mph from New York to Los Angeles. No, but on average. Most people can not even imagine how fast you must drive to remove it. How careful you have to be to avoid the cops. How did you get to be strategic where you go. And how much you endanger do, to say nothing of others.

In the US express arrested when police got wise to it. But culture gave birth to car rallies and supercar tuner in America and Europe. You know, things like the Gumball 3000, the rich idiots chasing Lambos parties and girls and coke as they hunted speed. If ever there was a justification for races like the Cannonball Express and US, it is much harder to find.

This is Roy comes in. With Maher and a support team of friends, he sought to prove the 1983 record was legitimate and beat him.


The tool for the job, maybe now famous, was modified BMW M5 E39 and equipped with radar detectors, a 16 gallon fuel cell, a CB radio, GPS navigation units, a police scanner, night vision, cameras to document the entire thing and delivered was a nod to the German Polizei. None of this was cheap: we see sound Roy at least one invoice for $ 25,000 to equip the M5.

Their drive voltage packs quite true unpredictability and it is worth the price of admission. The rowdy Roy and soft-spoken but determined Maher rockets through the roads of America, listen to the scanners try to hide when they spotted, weave in and out of traffic and work with their driver to dodge the cops. “Cop cop cop cop cop! “They almost constantly cry.

It is hard not to cringe at these scenes. I did every time I saw Maher sweep about 18 wheels and sport utility vehicles as they are fixed objects at speeds that you rarely see on American roads. They, and the 1983 veterans, all emphasize how they have worked to remain in their safety zones. I say that’s fine until another car suddenly cross your path when you go over 100 mph.